To St. Peter’s by the Waterfront in the heart of swinging downtown Ipswich, where Helen and The Neighbourhood Dogs have been engaged to be the house band at a wedding celebration with our tried and trusted combination of folk, country, pop, rock and roots music or, if you will, East Angliacana*. We have scoured the set list for appropriate material and in turn have discovered that very many of our songs involve sadness, romantic disappointment and in at least two cases, an unfortunate series of events involving a wedding. In fairness, most of the former are mine, but we are where we are. As one audience member is heard to remark “For six apparently well-adjusted individuals they do seem to be carrying quite a lot of collective emotional baggage.” In the discreet seats at the back my wife (Kelly Brook) is explaining to some of our friends the background, understanding and interpretation of some of the numbers in performance. “I like this one…it’s not about me, thankfully” she concludes at one stage.
As we are close to at least one satellite home base, we are able to conduct an issue-free soundcheck thanks to our redoubtable sound man Joe and then retire to a nearby kitchen table to enjoy a pre-match supper and the convivial experience of band downtime in comfortable surroundings. We return to the venue and regard the now equally well-appointed former church, which has been arranged in cabaret seating form, with jars of fairy lights, wedding favours and complementary key fobs adorning the tables. Our audience, it happens, include very many translators, polymaths and a large party of Brazilians. We feel that we must apologise for merely singing in English. At one point Mr. Wendell earns a generous round of applause for saying ‘Obrigado.’
As it happens, the guests are well up for the shared experience of – as Otis Lee Crenshaw posited – “…taking all this pain and misery and turn(ing) it into cold, hard cash” and we find ourselves being spontaneously clapped along with during songs and heartily applauded afterwards. They really are the most charming people. Toward the end of the second set we do a version of Bob Dylan’s ‘Love Minus Zero (No Limit)’ which La Mulley starts acapella and which has previously brought a Friday night pub crowd to a respectful silence, and so hearing it in an eight hundred year-old church where you could hear a key fob drop is really quite the experience. So entranced am I by the slow build of the verses that it is not until the third that I look to the audience, who it transpires have collectively decided to hold and sway with their phone torches, several jars of fairy lights, and at least one lighter. It really is quite magical.
Before we give way to some very, very loud music (Plastic Bertrand, Jon Bon Jovi, your Spotify royalties are on the way) for the purposes of frugging we have time for a special cover of a Bob Mould song for the bride and groom ( again, ‘If I Can’t Change Your Mind’ is hardly ‘On The Street Where You Live’ in lyrical terms, but they like it) and then yet another short tale of misery and desperation, albeit one set to a rousing singalong-friendly I-IV-V folk-tinged chord sequence which rarely lets us down and which closes the performance. Sure as eggs is eggs, there is sufficient swayage, arms-aloftness and cheering to reassure us that we have performed our function as best we can, and to retire to the (free) bar to toast our good fortune. The Present Mrs. Kirk takes a break from bawling the chorus to ‘Mr Brightside’ at top volume to compliment us on our show. “That was great, Babe” she purrs complimentarily “and I’ve actually learned something this evening. Who knew? You can dance to this shit.”
*Mr Wendell mentions that he has spent most of the intermission discussing The Clash, and suggests that if Joe Strummer were still with us, this is the sort of thing he would be doing. Mr. Gibbon has been chatting to Joe at the sound desk about Ed Sheeran. No-one seems to have a bad word about either of them.
